What Does Psalm 6:7 Mean?
My eye grows dim with vexation; it wears out because of all who press me.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for adversaries echoes narrowness and distress, and the verse shows that pressure reaching all the way to the eye.
THE MEANING
The verse names a present bodily cost: pressure from adversaries can exhaust the eyes until they seem dim and aged. The Hebrew word translated “grief” also carries vexation and anger, so what wears the eye is sustained disturbance, not sadness alone.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that grief stays private and invisible: here, pressure is visible in the eyes themselves.
THE ROOT
צֹרְרָי
tsorerai
GROWS FROM
צרר
The root צָרַר (tsarar) can mean to bind or to act as an adversary.
“who press me” in this verse is tsorerai. The word translated “enemies” carries the sense of hostile pressure. Its consonants echo צַר (tsar), “narrow,” and צָרָה (tsarah), “distress,” making the connection between adversaries and constriction audible without requiring every form to have the same derivation.
ALSO GROWS
tsror: A bundle or tied packet.
צְרוֹר
This form makes the root’s binding sense concrete; the adversary presses in like something bound around the person.
tsar: Narrow or tight; also an adversary.
צָר
The shared consonants link the foe with narrowness, illuminating how opposition can constrict the field of ease.
tsarah: Distress or trouble.
צָרָה
This word names the distress that such pressure brings, joining the adversaries in the verse to the eye’s exhaustion.
מִכַּעַס
mikka'as
GROWS FROM
כעס
The root כָּעַס (ka’as) means vexation, anger, or provocation.
The word translated “grief” has an edge of vexation and anger. It presents the eye’s decline as the mark of ongoing disturbance, not only inward sadness.
ALSO GROWS
ka'as: Vexation or anger.
כַּעַס
This noun gives the verse’s grief a sharper quality: the eye is worn by what keeps troubling or provoking the person.
hik'is: To provoke or anger.
הִכְעִיס
The verbal form points to the force that stirs vexation, echoing the pressure of the adversaries named in the verse.
עֵינִי
eini
GROWS FROM
עין
עַיִן (ʿayin) means eye; the related form עֵין (ʿein) also means a spring or source of water.
Hebrew uses the same word for an eye and a spring. This places the eye not only as the organ of sight but as a point of emergence: grief exhausts the place through which the world is seen.
ALSO GROWS
ʿayin: Eye or sight.
עַיִן
This is the bodily eye that the verse says is consumed by vexation.
ʿein: Spring or source of water.
עֵין
The shared word opens a connection between seeing and a source that flows; the verse’s eye is a source under strain.
THE PATTERN
Grief and pressure can become visible in sight itself, making the eyes register what the person bears.
My eye grows dim from grief, and all my limbs are a shadow.For this our heart has gone faint; for these our eyes have gone dark.Bend toward me, O LORD, for I am in a narrow place; my eye wastes away in grief, my living soul and my belly.THE THREAD
Bend toward me, O LORD, for I am in a narrow place; my eye wastes away in grief, my living soul and my belly.The rare Hebrew verb for the eye wasting away returns here in the same image. Psalm 31:9 makes the depletion more explicit by naming the eye, soul, and belly together.
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